Written by a veteran socialist and participant in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike of 1934, Labor’s Giant Step tells the story of the explosive labor struggles and political battles that forged the industrial union movement in the United States. As a Trotskyist during these struggles, Preis unmasks the Stalinists’ collaboration with the Roosevelt administration and the conservative trade union leaders, while vividly portraying the courage and determination of the tens of thousands of industrial workers who sacrificed so much to organize against the giant manufacturing monopolies during the 1930s and 40s.
Table of Contents
1. The ‘golden twenties’ collapse
2. ‘New Deal’–myth and fact
3. War on labor under the NRA
4. Three strikes that paved the way
5. Industrial vs. craft unionism
6. The CIO’s political coalition with Roosevelt
7. Flint ’37–‘Gettysburg’ of the CIO
8. The sit-down wave and Little Steel defeat
9. The Roosevelt depression and the CIO retreat
10. Internal conflicts and factions
11. Triumphs at River Rouge and Bethlehem
12. Roosevelt–open strikebreaker
13. The fight against the National Defense
14. The Minneapolis labor case
15. Roosevelt’s war labor curbs
16. The wartime wage freeze
17. The break between Lewis and Murray
18. How the miners won
19. ‘The situation is intolerable’
20. The War Labor Board and the Montgomery Ward strike
21. The fight against the no0strike pledge
22. Labor political action
23. American labor’s greatest upsurge
24. Truman’s anti-labor drive
25. Economic and legislative war on labor
26. The cold-war witch hunt begins
27. Conflict over the Marshall Plan
28. Taft-Hartley injunctions and faction strife
29. The Wallace campaign and Truman’s victory
30. Raids and purges
31. The ‘fourth round’ wage campaign
32. Splits and expulsions
33. Labor’s near-break with Truman
34. The third national steel strike
35. End of an era
36. New moves toward AFL-CIO merger
37. ’30 for 40′ and ‘GAW’
38. The witch hunt and labor struggles
39. The world’s largest union
